Re: new to Numerical Recipies

beliavsky_at_aol.com
Date: 01/26/05 

Date: 26 Jan 2005 06:38:53 -0800

David Wilkinson wrote:
>As an engineer I am trying to do some large number-crunching
calculaions
>in the CFD field so the criteria for the language are whether it is
>close to natural English and therefore easy to write and check and
>modify and whether it runs quickly when compiled. Pascal/Delphi has
the
>advantage that it is strongly typed and has a well-defined syntax and
a
>very fast compiler. If you can get the code to obey the syntax then it

>will probably do what you want it to do.

Fortran 90 and later versions of the language also meet these criteria
if the modern features are used, including modules. One way to enforce
this is to use the F subset. There are more compilers available for
more platforms than Pascal/Delphi, and I'd guess that they are even
better at optimizing, although I have not run tests. With its array
operations, there are many algorithms one can write more concisely in
Fortran 90/95 than in Pascal or C.

I don't wish to unfairly criticize Pascal. The book "Pascal for FORTRAN
programmers" has many code examples in Fortran 77 and Pascal, and I
find the Pascal code more readable, even though I have never used the
language. Fortran 90 did add the missing features of structured
programming that Fortran should have had long before, and whose absence
provided part of the motivation for Pascal.

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